#TechTipThursday: Enabling closed captions in Panopto

Accessibility in education gives all students the ability to obtain educational content. This includes accessibility to recordings that may be added to online portions of a course. This is often done by adding captions. Panopto lecture capture makes it possible for faculty to quickly and easily add closed captions to Panopto recorded videos. There are two options for the type of closed captions available within Panopto. The first option is free and is the option for machine generated closed captions, which are demonstrated in this post. The second option is professional human generated closed captions, which are not free, with cost depending on the length of the video.

We at the DEC recommend using machine generated captions only for short videos, as these captions are not 100% accurate.

After recording a Panopto video, you will need to edit the video.

Once in the edit window, you will want to select the “Captions” option on the left.

Selecting “Import automatic captions” will machine generate closed captions for the video. These captions may not be completely accurate. However, it is possible to go through and edit these captions to be correct.

In the video we used, you can see the machine generated captions above. As long as you speak clearly and the video is short, the captions should be fairly accurate.

When wanting to correct captions, click on the captions needing edits, and type the correction.

After you are done editing, be sure to click the “Publish” button to save your captions.